[cups.general] CUPS sucks!

[Michael Sweet]

On Aug 21, 2009, at 12:23 AM, ncoesel wrote:
> I've spend the last two days trying to get cups to work on an  
> embedded platform.

Um, CUPS is currently not supported on any embedded platforms,  
although I do know of several people playing with it there.

> The major problem I'm experiencing is that Cups provides no  
> diagnostic information at all so I don't know what I must fix.

You mean cupsd was not generating an error_log file listing the errors  
it found?

> It appeared my lp0 device had insufficient rights. Doesn't say in  
> the documentation, I had to visit the links in 3 pages of Google  
> results before I found an obscure forum that gave a hint towards the  
> rights.

The required permissions vary based on the Linux distribution you run;  
we don't document distribution-specific stuff...

> Now I still need to solve an 'Unsupported format' problem.

Sounds like you may want to enable raw printing - look at the  
mime.types and mime.convs files included with CUPS.

> Guys (and girls), this really needs fixing!

*What* needs fixing? Supporting embedded platforms? Documenting every  
platform's idiosyncrasies? Making the existing documentation more  
visible?

> The commands like lpstat, cupsd have no help to show the options (-- 
> help) or to show the version (--version).

There is a pending feature request for this; in short, we never  
implemented these options because they are not standard for those  
commands  and we have extensive help (http://localhost:631/help) and  
man page coverage.

___________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Senior Printing System Engineer